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Arrest Stokes Concerns About Radicalized Muslims

14 March 2010 05:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The arrest in Yemen of a New Jersey man accused of joining Al Qaeda is the latest in an alarming string of cases involving radicalized American Muslims, a trend some experts link to the duration of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€ newspaper.

Yemeni authorities said this week that the American, Sharif Mobley, 26, who had worked for six years as a laborer at nuclear plants in New Jersey, had been arrested last week in Sana, the Yemeni capital, in a sweep of militants tied to the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda and the Somali movement Al Shabab.

Taken to a hospital for medical treatment, Mr. Mobley was said to have grabbed a security guardâ€™s gun and shot two guards, one of them fatally, before being subdued, Yemeni officials said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday that it was investigating Mr. Mobleyâ€™s record, though a commission spokeswoman, Diane Screnci, said the agency â€œis not aware of any security-related concerns or incidents related to Mr. Mobleyâ€™s prior employment.â€ A spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, which operates two nuclear power plants in southern New Jersey, said Mr. Mobley had passed background checks and did routine labor and maintenance at those plants and others in Pennsylvania and Maryland from 2002 to 2008.

American and Yemeni officials said Mr. Mobley, like the Nigerian man accused of trying to bomb a jetliner headed to Detroit on Dec. 25, had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric whose radical sermons have been found on the computers of more than a dozen terrorism suspects in the West. Mr. Awlaki, now in hiding in Yemen, had also exchanged e-mail messages with Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in Texas in November.
News of Mr. Mobleyâ€™s arrest followed the disclosure of charges this week against a 46-year-old American Muslim convert from the Philadelphia suburbs who called herself â€œJihad Janeâ€ and is accused of plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. The police in Ireland arrested seven people on Tuesday who are suspected of having been involved in the plot against the cartoonist; one of the suspects is also an American, a law enforcement official said.

The mother of a Colorado woman told The Associated Press on Friday that her daughter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, was among those arrested in Ireland. Her arrest was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The Irish Times reported on its Web site on Saturday that three of those arrested had been released. It was not clear whether Ms. Paulin-Ramirez was among them. Ms. Paulin-Ramirezâ€™s family could not be located for comment.

The cases this week are the latest in a series of terrorism accusations against Americans over the past year that have challenged the conventional wisdom that American Muslims are less susceptible to extremism than those in Europe.

â€œItâ€™s a troubling trend, fed by an ideological claim found all over the Web that says the U.S. is at war with Islam,â€ said Rick Nelson, director of the counterterrorism program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and co-author of a new study of the homegrown extremist threat.

â€œThatâ€™s the message we have to puncture,â€ Mr. Nelson said. While such concerns â€œcanâ€™t drive our foreign policy,â€ the radicalizing effect of large-scale military intervention overseas must be weighed by policy makers, he said.

The study said the perception that the United States is singling out Muslims, fueled by years of military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and other Muslim countries, plays a greater role than â€œpoverty or social marginalizationâ€ in turning a small number of Americans toward extremism.

President Obama took office last year determined to combat the notion that the United States was hostile to Islam. He pledged to close the GuantÃ¡namo Bay, Cuba, detention center and to withdraw troops from Iraq, and he gave a speech in Cairo aimed at addressing Muslim concerns.
But he also ordered 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and stepped up missile strikes from drone aircraft on suspected militants in Pakistan. Al Qaeda propaganda has hammered on such actions, arguing that Mr. Obama is no different from his predecessor.

The report on homegrown terrorism found that the other common factor in recent cases of radicalization was the role of â€œtransnational terrorist recruitersâ€ like Mr. Awlaki, who lived in the United States from 1990 to 2002. Mr. Awlaki gained a large following among English-speaking Muslims with lectures on compact discs and MP3s, along with a Facebook page and a Web site, which was taken down after he posted a message in November praising the Fort Hood killings.

About 10 plots or attacks by Muslim militants in the United States last year resulted in 14 deaths, a minuscule fraction of the nationâ€™s approximately 14,000 homicides. But counterterrorism officials consider radicalized Americans a particularly dangerous threat, because they can operate freely here with a nativeâ€™s understanding of language, culture and security vulnerabilities.

Suspects in the recent rash of cases have diverse backgrounds. â€œJihad Jane,â€ the Web name adopted by Colleen R. LaRose, is a middle-aged convert to Islam. Najibullah Zazi, a former coffee vendor who pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up the New York City subway, is a legal immigrant from Afghanistan. Major Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist, is the American son of Palestinian immigrants.

Mr. Mobley, also born in the United States, is from a Muslim family of Somali immigrants. His parents, Charles and Cynthia, told WMGM television in South Jersey that Sharif was a â€œgood Muslimâ€ and not a terrorist, and that they were trying to get more information on what happened to him in Yemen. They said F.B.I. agents had visited them. Special Agent Richard J. Wolf, a spokesman for the bureauâ€™s Baltimore office, which is handling the matter, said he could not comment on the case.

Imam Anas Muhaimin of Masjid Quba, a mosque in Philadelphia, said in an interview that he first knew Sharif Mobley when he attended classes on Arabic and Islam at the mosque as a child. Mr. Mobley occasionally prayed at the mosque in recent years, and in 2007, consulted with Imam Muhaimin about his plan to go to Yemen to study Arabic.

â€œI strongly discouraged him from going to Yemen,â€ Imam Muhaimin said. â€œI told him Yemen was very, very unstable.â€ He said that he had suggested language programs in Egypt and Morocco instead, but that Mr. Mobley â€œcompletely rejected my advice.â€

â€œHe said heâ€™d made his plans and was determined to go to Yemen,â€ Imam Muhaimin said.

Some American Muslims, he said, reject the teaching of American Islamic scholars and look abroad to those who preach extremism. â€œThereâ€™s a feeling that authentic Islam is only found overseas, and I think that may be what happened in this case,â€ he said.